Ask HN: Save my dying Startup - <AUTHOR>

Dear HNers, I am writing this post in hopes of getting some help on saving my startup which is slowly decaying before my eyes; countless hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars spent, and a ton of sacrifice just dying. There is a wealth of knowledge that exists at HN and I'm hoping some folks can steer me in the right direction with my dying startup because at this point I'm not sure what to do? About three years ago, my friend and I thought up an idea for creating a "social network for traders." He had worked in finance for one of the biggest forex brokers and was a trader of foreign exchange. A few months into his work, he realized that this company, with its millions of clients, was missing a critical component that clients constantly kept asking about "can I communicate with other clients regarding certain positions or trends in the market?" Coming from a web development/IT background,  I immediately got to work on creating a small prototype of what we both envisioned to be a forum for currency traders to come and discuss their strategies, trades, tips and suggestions on choosing brokers, etc. etc. The website was simple but as we put more effort into it, we realized there wasn't any real competitor to a website that caters to an international community of traders at all. We figured our ideas are on a much bigger scale and we decided to proceed further and bring our ideas to fruition. What started as a hobby and then a venture soon turned into a business. Six months into it, we picked up an angel investor overseas (coincidentally, one of my buddy's clients who was interested in such an idea). As money rolled in, web development expanded dramatically. We outsourced all the dev work to India, having two firms work around the clock, we hired mathematicians to help with formulas, and hired graphic artists. We managed teams of workers and went through countless design phases and formula tweaks. The overall premise of the site expanded from a simple forum to a world wide community, where traders can interact and compete with other traders by predicting the weeks end financial markets. Today, our weekly competitions, allow traders to pick from various local or world markets, and try to predict how that respective market will close. Besides forex, we include other markets such as futures, U.S. markets and world markets. Each prediction is graded based on a unique scale according to our internal algorithm. The scale "tiers" are provided on the website in layman's terms to make the user understand how he can earn or lose virtual dollars (which in turn, can be redeemed for real-world prizes). In the short team, the momentum was flowing and we were convinced that we were on the up and up. We had enough money for development and knew what we needed to spend to get to where we wanted to be. Then in 2009, our investor backed out half way into the process leaving us with no money left for marketing (we originally wanted to leave 60% for marketing and advertising). Today, we still believe in our idea but ever since the money dried up, we found ourselves not being able to market the website properly and in turn leaving it stale and hope that word-of-mouth will help. Development is more or less complete and we have active users trading but the momentum is gone and in a way so is our motivation. The easy answer is to say "keep working at it" but it is difficult especially when time is so valuable (we are in our late 20's and life is becoming more challenging i.e. jobs, women, money, etc.). What does an aspiring entrepreneur do now knowing that his idea can still work but has no motivation to continue without short-term incentives? <comment><USER3> For me, the text is just one huge blob, so I made a half-assed attempt to format it so that it's more readable:

The website he is referring to is <http://www.yatrader.com>

\---

Dear HNers,

I am writing this post in hopes of getting some help on saving my startup which is slowly decaying before my eyes; countless hours of work, tens of thousands of dollars spent, and a ton of sacrifice just dying. There is a wealth of knowledge that exists at HN and I'm hoping some folks can steer me in the right direction with my dying startup because at this point I'm not sure what to do?

About three years ago, my friend and I thought up an idea for creating a "social network for traders." He had worked in finance for one of the biggest forex brokers and was a trader of foreign exchange.

A few months into his work, he realized that this company, with its millions of clients, was missing a critical component that clients constantly kept asking about "can I communicate with other clients regarding certain positions or trends in the market?"

Coming from a web development/IT background, I immediately got to work on creating a small prototype of what we both envisioned to be a forum for currency traders to come and discuss their strategies, trades, tips and suggestions on choosing brokers, etc. etc.

The website was simple but as we put more effort into it, we realized there wasn't any real competitor to a website that caters to an international community of traders at all.

We figured our ideas are on a much bigger scale and we decided to proceed further and bring our ideas to fruition. What started as a hobby and then a venture soon turned into a business.

Six months into it, we picked up an angel investor overseas (coincidentally, one of my buddy's clients who was interested in such an idea). As money rolled in, web development expanded dramatically. We outsourced all the dev work to India, having two firms work around the clock, we hired mathematicians to help with formulas, and hired graphic artists. We managed teams of workers and went through countless design phases and formula tweaks.

The overall premise of the site expanded from a simple forum to a world wide community, where traders can interact and compete with other traders by predicting the weeks end financial markets.

Today, our weekly competitions, allow traders to pick from various local or world markets, and try to predict how that respective market will close. Besides forex, we include other markets such as futures, U.S. markets and world markets.

Each prediction is graded based on a unique scale according to our internal algorithm. The scale "tiers" are provided on the website in layman's terms to make the user understand how he can earn or lose virtual dollars (which in turn, can be redeemed for real-world prizes).

In the short team, the momentum was flowing and we were convinced that we were on the up and up. We had enough money for development and knew what we needed to spend to get to where we wanted to be.

Then in 2009, our investor backed out half way into the process leaving us with no money left for marketing (we originally wanted to leave 60% for marketing and advertising).

Today, we still believe in our idea but ever since the money dried up, we found ourselves not being able to market the website properly and in turn leaving it stale and hope that word-of-mouth will help. Development is more or less complete and we have active users trading but the momentum is gone and in a way so is our motivation.

The easy answer is to say "keep working at it" but it is difficult especially when time is so valuable (we are in our late 20's and life is becoming more challenging i.e. jobs, women, money, etc.).

What does an aspiring entrepreneur do now knowing that his idea can still work but has no motivation to continue without short-term incentives? \---

<comment><AUTHOR> Lesson learned; don't type and paste from notepad when you want someones full attention. Sorry!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This comment is for your post, not your question.

Maybe I just have a short attention span, but I could not read through this giant block of text. I'd suggest breaking it up into bite-size paragraphs and adding a URL so people can have more of an idea what you're talking about.

</comment><comment><USER5> The only reason you'll fail is because your product sucks, not lack of marketing or money.

You are trying to do too much too soon, making everything mediocre crap.

1) Simplify everything; figure out what the one thing your site does well is (whatever is doing most successful, which looks like contests/predictions). Get rid of everything that people aren't using, like yaNotes.

2) Don't do international, focus on building where you live and work. Nobody cares that theres international traders. I'd rather have 500 US traders then 25 traders from 20 countries. This is called the network effect.

3) Clean up your homepage after you've done accordingly. Users probably only need to see 3 sentences out of what you've written.

4) Make something viral a core part of your product (getting users to announce predictions on twitter to be part of a giveaway?).

I hate to say it, but you did it wrong (I did this too while trying to build a social network). You poured money into it thinking you could design the perfect community and features and just launch it. I see nothing that requires hiring graphics artists, mathematicians, or two outsourced dev firms.

You can still make this a success, just expect to lose a majority of what you have now. All the work you've put in will essentially be deleted and you'll have to let it go. Good luck.

<comment><USER6> Agree with the above. The problem is that by the sounds of your description your product has one killer feature - an algorithm to rate peers' predictions - but the website itsef looks like a generic consumer portal/network

Marketing spend itself shouldn't be an issue - you can drive traffic organically through blogging and even banging on the doors of your friends' old contacts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> At the risk of sounding foolish, there is some truth to "keeping at it." Check out airBnB's talk startup school; you guys seem to be in a similar place as they were a year or so ago.

According to you, you're nearly complete with development, and marketing is your biggest expense. That's better than some situations (no cash, no products either). Marketing is the easiest thing to reduce in expenses.

The most powerful tools in your marketing arsenal are handshakes, telephones and business cards. Go to small groups for face-to-face conferences with potential users, and take your current users out for a series of lunches/beers. Contribute as much as possible to the user generated content of the site itself. If it is a form of web2.0 for traders, you and the rest of the team should post things several times a day - the site may become much richer because of it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The URL of my startup is <http://www.yatrader.com>.

        * When users Sign Up, they choose their geographic location (choices consist of City/State and Country around the world). So let's say, Joe Trader (from Moscow, Russia)  joins. He can find other traders from Moscow/Ukraine. Or also see other traders from other Cities and Countries (Main page description should emphasize that this is a International community site)

        * Traders can come and showcase their skills by making prediction on future markets through our weekly contest. Again, the markets can be their local COUNTRY markets or they can play other (international) markets (Joe Trader from Russia can play our NASDAQ U.S. market).

        * Traders can interact through private messaging or through profiles by posting comments on wall to wall.

        * Every trader has a profile that shows their information such as but not limited to: contact info, buddies, and local buddies (users that are from their location) as well as their preference for markets they follow.

        * There is also a "Streak" indicator. When a user correctly (or accurately) makes predictions each week he/she will be awarded Streak points that will allow them to earn extra points which can later be redeemed for prizes. Streaks will also elevate the user's reputation on the website because it will show him to be knowledgeable in the financial markets he plays.

        * Prizes can be redeemed for virtual dollars earned called YaDollars -- it is our unique currency system.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the key phrase to me:

 _What does an aspiring entrepreneur do now knowing that his idea can still work but has no motivation to continue without short-term incentives?_

Startups are 1% idea, 6% brilliant founders, and 93% tenacity[1]. Of course, you have to be tenacious in a smart way, which typically means iterating and knowing when to pivot. If you're not motivated to stick it out, then your best bet is probably to put the project on ice. Maybe you'll find the funding and motivation in a year or two. But unless you want to do that, you need to keep grinding it out.

The hard part about grinding it out is that you're out of money, and you outsourced your development. That puts you in a hard position. Can you take over lead development yourself, and work on it nights/weekends?

Beyond that, read some Steve Blank. Are you convinced that: (1) people really want your product, and (2) you've built a product that clicks really well with the market? If not, you need to do that before you do anything else. No point in marketing a product that doesn't click. If you've done that, then it's a matter of getting the word out.

[1] Citation needed.

</comment><comment><USER9> Have you looked at competitors like Stockpickr, StockTwits, inTrade, and Motley Fool CAPS? How is your site different from them and what can you do better? When I go to the site it shouts "contests" and stock market game, which has existed in a lot of forms before.

It's not clear to me what the value proposition is - this could use some work. Sites like this essentially come down to one question: "How does this help me make money?" You have a lot of users making predictions about the market - <USER2> you roll this up in a more understandable and actionable way? Why should someone be required to log in before they can see the data? If you're trying to create a community, it would also be helpful to actually see community content on the front page (like discussions, etc) not just their cold predictions.

<comment><USER10> I agree. As a trader, I see no point in joining. I really do not care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> so, here's what I'd do. I'd make it free (if you intend to start charging at some point, make that clear to your customers. It's best to never raise prices, you know instead add some premium feature... you can have the old thing for free, but we have these new useful features you have to pay for. but sometimes, that's not practical. Next best is to say "It's free... but won't always be so")

Now, for free to work, you need to make sure your infrastructure is cheap. You'd be amazed how many users you can cram on to a $2500 AMD server with 8 cores and 32GiB ram that costs you $200/month to co-locate. (depending on your financial situation... if those numbers aren't trivially small to you, you may want to start with a $20/month VPS and scale up as you need. I'm just pointing out you can save a whole lot of money once you start needing capacity by outsourcing less.)

This will give the site a chance to grow, if users like it. If it does grow, well, that's exciting, right?

See, meanwhile, I'd get a job. It's nice to have a job. It's a different pace, you get health insurance and a bunch of cash, and you don't have to work so hard. A job isn't forever. My experience has been that if I'm feeling frustrated and hopeless with my company, a year at a regular job cures me.

If people start getting interested in the site and it excites you, you can quit and go back to doing it. If people start getting interested in the site and you still want to keep your job, well, customers will attract new investors and possible partners. Stock brokers are usually good marketers, so I think you may have potential marketing people in your customer base.

<comment><AUTHOR> Although I said a lot in my original post I did leave out some key points as it relates to the startup; a. Our website is 100% free to join and play... for now. Obviously future investors will want to see ROI but for the near future it remains to be free (subscription plans for better prizes is what's planned for long-term. b. As far as infrastructure goes, we are actually lucky in that our original investor is hosting our website for free with his own server(s) and security --it was part of our original agreement. c. I'm actually employed full time, and finished up my masters not too long ago. That's I think where the problem began, when I actually decided to take on more responsibilities at work AND enroll into grad school... All of a sudden the startup now had 1/4 of my attention and I assume things went static from then on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> And the URL is?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry for not posting the URL at first. The website is <http://www.yatrader.com>.

To reiterate, the goal of the site is to create an international community, where traders can interact and compete with other traders by predicting the week's end financial markets (we offer 4 categories of markets). In return for user participation (i.e. predicting markets, posting "YaNotes" which are reasons for trades) we give them a chance to earn virtual dollars called "YaDollars" which can then be redeemed for real prizes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> What's the lack of motivation due to? If you're not motivated by the product anymore then get out now, but if you're just feeling beaten down then absolutely keep at it.

When you say you outsourced all the development it sounds like you expected this project to take off without getting your hands dirty. What have you been doing to market it? Word of mouth won't help you if you're not even talking about it. Go out to conferences and meetups and talk. Get to know bloggers or journalists who write about investing. You have some users? Talk to them. Ask them what they love and what they hate about your product. Find out how they're using it. Find people who aren't using your product and see how they're solving their own problems. I know a trader who still uses IRC chats. Start asking a bunch of questions and get excited!

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the main page of the site has too much information. It is difficult to find out what is the main purpose of this site?

The site have stats and recent activities sections where only one user keeps reporting some values. These sections should be removed as it makes me think does this site has only user? Such sections make sense when site has enough activities to report, otherwise new users would think no one is using it so it is not worth signing up.

Basically the website looks more like old-styled corporate website than call- to-action website. You may have to hire professional website designer to get any mileage. Alternatively put only one thing which you do the best and remove everything else.

</comment><comment><USER15> That's a lot of words, basically it boils down to:

We are a late stage start-up and our follow up money failed us at a critical moment.

What made your investor back out ?

Can you scale back your expenses to below your income ?

</comment><comment><USER16> If you know the idea can work, than a limited/non-existent marketing budget shouldn't stop you and it certainly shouldn't discourage you this much.

It sounds to me like you need to dig deeper, both into getting more funding and reviving your motivation. You've come this far. It seems a foolish idea to me that you would consider pulling the plug becacuse you lack cash for marketing.

Cash can be found. Keep at it. Perseverence is hard and success has peaks and valleys. Just because you're in a valley right now, doesn't mean it will last forever.

</comment><comment><USER17> I agree with most of the comments here: trim the fat. Hack away the unnecessary. Omit unnecessary words. And other such sage wisdom.

An idea: if you have enough of a core user base who would be willing to help fund you, consider <http://kickstarter.com>. You could have one helluva comeback story on your hands if you tell the story right and make it emotionally resonant. Play with the idea however you like, I don't want to be too specific as it will hinder the process.

</comment><comment><USER18> I have no encouragement to sign up. Why not? Because I can't see what kind of discussion is happening in the community. If I click on any of the communities I get a sign up pop up and no discussion. I'm not handing over my info till I see what kind of discussion is happening. I get frustrated and then I'm off to Motley Fooll CAPS or Stockhouse.

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting post. Perhaps you and the guys from Intrade could work something out. I know their CEO and he is always looking out for cool ideas and joinh ventures. Why not mail him. His eamil is john.delaney @ intrade.com

Say Billy Flynn suggested you make contact with him.

</comment><comment><USER20> See that big dark grey blank area in your header? Give me the strongest benefit/advantage I could get from using your service up there. For instance: YaTrader: Information Advantage For Financial Junkies.

I need to see it spelled out clearly and boldly.

</comment><comment><USER21> The international time clocks on your landing page say it best: you need to trim a lot of fat from your landing page, and probably the app itself.

The join button's on the bottom left, and I'm forced to read a half dozen paragraphs to even figure out what the site does.

Digging in, the site carries this feature-rich / benefit-poor style throughout.

If you're serious about saving the start-up I would reccomend that you either hire a professional UI / marketing firm or look for that skill set in a late stage "co-founder".

The underlying tech and idea are great, but the execution of the user interface and messaging need a lot of work before you're going to get traction.

</comment><comment><USER22> By the looks of it, you could also consider offering this for free and charge for some sort of api access.

</comment><comment><USER23> I am curious. Did you outsource the UI/US as well to the Indian Development firms ?

</comment><comment><USER24> ever see currensee.com?</comment>


Regexp Ranges and Locales: A Long Sad Story - <AUTHOR> https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/html_node/Ranges-and-Locales.html <comment><USER2> Leaving the behavior undefined in almost all commonly used locales (i.e. anything involving UTF-8) doesn't seem to be a particularly helpful standard.

It's unreasonable to expect someone who writes regexp to anticipate which locales a user will execute his program in. It's just as unreasonable to tell him to stick to an outdated locale. How about we ignore locales altogether and just use code points? Code point order is the only ordering that every locale can agree on. [a-z] should match any character whose code point is between U+0061 and U+007A regardless of the locale.

<comment><USER3> I agree that it is terrible that this is undefined, but utf-8 is not a Locale. That is an encoding. The standard works just fine when you use C as the Locale and utf-8 as the encoding. I think they should have just defined ranges as being the encoding values, because that would make more sense, but that would be exactly the opposite of what the standard previously said.

<comment><USER2> > utf-8 is not a Locale.

Of course it isn't. What I suggested above is to use neither locales nor UTF-8, but code points. "a" = U+0061 no matter which locale you're in, and no matter which encoding you use. Every locale and every encoding is based on the same universal mapping of characters to code points.

<comment><USER4> Sure, but those code points are arbitrary. For instance in German languages, you may want a-z to include umlauted vowels, or you may not. That's a locale specific setting, even though the umlauted characters come well outside of the range of ascii a to z.

<comment><USER5> Keeping ranges undefined doesn't satisfy these wants, either.

Using code points would at least allow for ranges to have the possibility of being usable to someone in a standard, predictable fashion, outside of the C/POSIX locale.

For example, specifying a-z plus each umlauted vowel is still shorter than specifying all letters individually.

Perhaps there is some wisdom in William S. Burrough's "If you can't be just, be arbitrary."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm sure POSIX thought about this a lot more than I have, so I'm probably missing something and am about to say something that is actually stupid, but...

It should overload items of the form "x-y" in ranges where x and y are single characters in the locale in use. It should define specific items of this form as not being ranges but simply shorthand for certain predefined strings. The expression is treated as if those items were replaced by the corresponding predefined strings before the regular expression was parsed.

In particular "a-z" => "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz". Similar for uppercase. Include such a definition to produce each possible substring of length 2 or more of "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz". Similar for "0-9".

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure what you're saying, when would that be different from what we have today?

I don't see why that would be beneficial. You also might want ranges as [a-fk-z] (for example)

<comment><USER6> > I'm not sure what you're saying, when would that be different from what we > have today?

The situation today is that "[a-z]" is undefined by POSIX if you are not in the POSIX locale. I'm suggesting that it, and similar cases, should be made defined in all locales that include a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, and z.

> You also might want ranges as [a-fk-z] (for example)

Looking back, I wrote unclearly. Where I wrote 'overload items of the form "x-y" in ranges' it would have been better to write 'overload items of the form "x-y" inside bracket expressions'.

In "[a-fk-z]" there are two items of that form. Under my suggestions, "a-f" would be replaced with "abcdef" in all locales, and "k-z" would be replaced with "klmnopqrstuvwxyz", giving "[abcdefklmnopqrstuvwxyz]".

<comment><USER8> But would a-z also include for example à and ä, or should 0-9 include ½?

(The solution that glibc will implement is to un-interleave lowercase and uppercase characters whenever the collation order is like aàAÀbBcC...).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Related:

[https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23393](https://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=23393) ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557243](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17557243))

</comment><comment><USER10> > _'[ "-/]' is perfectly valid in ASCII, but is not valid in many Unicode > locales, such as en_US.UTF-8._

Why is this the case? Collation sequences, I'm guessing?

<comment><USER11> Yes, slash sorts before double-quote in this locale:

      $ (echo '"'; echo '/') | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 sort
      /
      "

<comment><USER12> Edit: nevermind, I apparently rm'd the offending locale directory last time I encountered a bug like this and sort is silently ignoring LC_ALL:

      bash: warning: setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot change locale (en_US.UTF-8): No such file or directory

I can't reproduce this bug:

      $ (echo '"'; echo '/') | LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 sort
      "
      /
      $ sort --version
      sort (GNU coreutils) 8.26

What version are you using?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've seen something that sounds related. In grep, in the en_US.UTF-8 locale, sometimes I can match [A-Z]+ and it will match accented uppercase strings such as "SCHÖN". It will not match lowercase letters.

This is often desirable, except for the part that I don't know what the heck ranges mean anymore. "Ö" is certainly not between "A" and "Z" in codepoint order. It is in collation order, but if it were collation order, it would match lowercase letters. How does this work?

<comment><USER8> Collation order did not interleave lowercase and uppercase until recently, except in a few oddball locales (e.g. cs_CZ.UTF-8).

Interleaving was added to all locales recently, and people started complaining that their scripts broke, so it will probably be reverted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> People seem to be missing character classes like [[:upper:]]. If you need some other sort of range in a portable script, say, just make sure you set LC_COLLATE. And if you're testing with GNU sort, use --debug to check what it's actually doing in case you don't have the definition for the current LC_COLLATE, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER15> My main problem with the [A-Za-z0-9] notation is that it looks great at first glance. I mean, it looks really, really great. _Of course_ [A-Z] means all capital letters. And then you think about it, and you start to suspect something like the situation described in the article. Suddenly, you're in the familiar but dizzying position of being perched atop a shoddily-built and wobbling tower of abstractions. You feel your familiar nausea soaking in from the periphery of your editor window.

I _just_ now, minutes ago, got some regexes to mostly sorta work in a project to convert some jai alai score data (converted from wonky pdf files). It's a one-off script. My Python is rusty, but I couldn't find how to get a posix descriptor for 'lowercase letters and uppercase letters' to work. [A-Za-z] happens to work, for now.

I _love_ regexes. I _hate_ regexes.

<comment><USER16> Every (Finnish) first grader knows that [A-Z] _obviously_ doesn't mean all capital letters, because the letters Å, Ä, and Ö follow Z in the alphabet ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > the 2008 standard had changed the definition of ranges, such that outside > the "C" and "POSIX" locales, the meaning of range expressions was > _undefined_

It was changed earlier. It's undefined in the 2004 edition, too.

<comment><USER6> And no change in the 2017 edition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Aren't there already half a dozen Linus Torvalds rants on the brain-damaged stupidity of the POSIX specs? The story is long and _sad_ because the developers thought following the spec was more important than writing usable software.</comment>


Terrible Business Strategies I Learned from Fyre Festival (22:38) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI <comment><AUTHOR> (top comment taken from queuebit)

1\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=127s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=127s) \- You have your idea, and suddenly your idea becomes 12 different ideas to each person you are pitching it to

2\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=365s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=365s) \- "We're in the solutions business; we're not in the problems business"

3\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=668s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=668s) \- Weird micromanagement

4\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=812s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=812s) \- A marketing plan is not a business

5\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=910s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=910s) \- Fake it til you make it.

6\. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=1108s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvQxoSMxEUI&t=1108s) \- If you think your business is more important than your customers</comment>


Does MySQL care about Windows users?  - <AUTHOR> http://www.webyog.com/blog/2009/07/23/does-mysql-care-about-windows-users/ MySQL developers are showing indifference to Windows users - even though Windows downloads outnumber other platforms by a huge margin. <comment><USER3> Alternatively: why aren't more Windows MySQL users submitting patches?

</comment><comment><USER4> I suggest that Windows users ask for a refund. There's lots of commercial db software out there.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's a big problem with a product when you can't even get through the installer. I've tried 3-4 separate times to get MySQL installed on several different Windows boxes, and the installer has been broken. Eventually, I just gave up and used postgres, which has proved to be a great move in the long run.

<comment><AUTHOR> I empathize with you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Download WAMP and you can use MySQL on Windows with no-problems. It can also run as a standalone Package. You can also download the Designer and it is ALL for FREE!

<comment><AUTHOR> The problems discussed in this articles are very much in existence in WAMP.

<comment><USER6> What problems? If there any, they are so minor the advantages by far outweigh these. I have been using it since probably version one and categorically without any hassle. (Even in the pre-WAMP days I never had any serious problems with it).

For me it has been the Golden Bridge allowing me to develop locally on a Windows machine and to deploy in the real world on LAMP!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yannis, If you are using MySQL every day chances are very less that you haven't bumped into these nasty bugs. You can check the links provided by the author to the bugs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess the Wamp installers take care of this for you. I've been using Mysql on Windows via Wamp for years without a problem.

btw, the SQLyog product that Webyog makes is awesome. I use it all day, everyday.

</comment><comment><USER8> _raised left eyebrow_ Does anyone care about Windows users?

If you're doing any heavy development with a set of open source tools on Windows - I don't know it just seems like nonsense. Dual boot, vmware, virtual box, hackintosh, whatever means necessary, but it's always been my fundamental belief that I work in an environment as close as possible to what I'm deploying to. You're just creating headaches for yourself otherwise.

And if this is headed towards any kind of production/hosting thing, you - <USER2> someone above you - are making a series of pretty poor decisions. I'm not sure there is any other way to put it.

<comment><USER9> But you assume _everyone_ is deploying to a Linux and a server environment. What if you are writing a desktop app: a poker assistant, a contacts deduper, whatever. Some datasets strain the usual embedded dbs, and MySQL would be great... if it worked consistently on windows.

<comment><USER8> Then use SQLite, MySQL is overkill for this situation.

Or better yet, use any of the FREE versions of SQL Server specifically slotted for the desktop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does the preponderance of MySQL users care about Windows?

<comment><USER11> Does that matter? Those users who _do_ care should get the support they can expect if management claims to be committed to Windows, regardless of how many they are. It's a simple matter of putting your money where your mouth is: if you care, you make sure you have people who can support Windows and like to take responsibility to bring it up to par with the other platforms, otherwise you make it clear that Windows is a second-class citizen and you should be prepared to get a poorer-quality product with less support.

From a short-term management perspective it seems better to have just the promise of support than to have nothing at all, but in the long term you're sending a signal that MySQL on Windows isn't to be taken seriously, and that you don't want people who are committed to Windows as customers. That's as fine a business decision as any, but then it's cheaper to cut out Windows development altogether than to go about it halfheartedly.

<comment><USER8> I can't think of one good reason why you would use MySQL on Windows. I know this seems trollish, but it's the honest to goodness truth.

Either way, it's not likely Windows is all that significant in terms of MySQL usage or you'd be seeing more activity and movement on that front. And Windows developers aren't really all that open source savvy yet either ...

<comment><AUTHOR> MySQL on windows is huge. Did you know that Windows downloads outnumber other platforms by a huge?

<comment><USER12> I'm not sure what "a huge" is, but download numbers from the MySQL website would obviously be weighted towards platforms where the distribution providers for a given manufacturer's operating system don't ship a usable version. Since Microsoft doesn't provide MySQL as the OS manufacturer, nor do Windows distributors like Dell ship a packaged MySQL installation, then it makes sense that Windows would be well represented in download numbers of binaries from the mysql website.

There's also a trend, at least in performance centric circles, to start building from source with patches or using third-party binaries, like those provided by percona, and other stuff not provided for on the mysql website.

Downloads from any one website are ultimately not indicative of the actual usage of the software, especially when it comes to freely repackagable open- source.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm afraid I'm not a purist. You cannot deny the fact that windows is ubiquitous & for any software claiming to support it, it is 'huge', I repeat its 'huge'. Just check this report ([http://dev.mysql.com/tech- resources/articles/mysql_on_window...](http://dev.mysql.com/tech- resources/articles/mysql_on_windows.html)) from _MySQL_ itself on how 'huge' windows platform is.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


IPhone Killers & Letting Problems Pull Your Strings - <AUTHOR> http://sweatyd.posterous.com/iphone-killers-and-letting-problems-pull-your

<comment><USER4> "Apple is the David (relatively speaking) that's got these Goliaths on the run."

When is this ridiculous idea going to die the death it deserves? Apple is _not_ anything even remotely resembling a small, agile, outgunned company up against other giants. It is a Goliath that frequently crushes other Davids.

People point to the iPhone and say how they took over an industry. Yes, much like Microsoft did with the XBOX, when a tech giant decides to go into a new industry, you generally have to watch out. MS played their hands well and now they're a major player in the games industry, likewise Apple did the same with the iPhone

<comment><USER5> I'd love to see Apple come out with a game console. I don't know if it would destroy 360/PS3 per say, but I think the Wii would be an easy target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Don't start with 'solving a problem' because what you are really doing is polishing before you have a thing to polish."

This taken out of context would be all wrong. I never build anything that's not going to solve some core problem my users have. I think, though, that he means, "Don't start with solving a problem inherent to your, or a competitor's, product."

</comment><comment><USER7> _> Can you imagine anything more ridiculous than a bunch of CEOs of Verizon, and Google, and Sony Ericsson, and Nokia, sitting around the table, and going "How are we going to answer the iPhone ?"_

Unfortunately, you will rot and die a sad and painful death if you don't do precisely that. As a company, you always have to respond to your competitors. Whether you choose to do that by trying to catch up to your competitors or blow the competition away is what matters.

<comment><USER8> Sadly the answer to "how are we going to answer the iphone" is not anything surprising or interesting - the answer is usually - "lets make our own iphone a-like and customers will buy it because they don't want to buy Apple or because they are tied to a different network" and I think that is what the article is getting at.

if the answer was: "ok people like small gadgets that are connected (for example iphones and netbooks). Let us see what we can come up with" - <USER2> perhaps we would see something better.

<comment><USER9> Like it or not, Steve Jobs is a trendsetter for the electronics industry, and the strategy of aping his successes generally tends to work out well for other players. For example, if it weren't for large, established companies knocking off whatever Apple is doing, Windows wouldn't exist.

<comment><USER8> so yes I understand that.

I also understand that Hollywood finds it safer to remake (and make sequels to) old successes than to innovate

As an end user I wish it wasn't like that. I can live with Hollywood because it _is_ possible to make low budget movies and people do - there is a thriving independent film industry. Likewise for software its affordable to start up on your own and innovate. Hardware is a whole other kettle of fish though - <USER3> afford to work with and on the miniaturisation needed for these kind of devices - its still beyond most small enterprises. Which is where innovation typically resides.

Yes of course its safer for these people to spend their money following the leaders - just that it would be nice if there where a few more leaders (and I speak as someone who has many mac computers)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> How about Mac Vs PC ads from apple? Does that make apple "against Microsoft", whatever that means...</comment>


Show HN: Java Code Review and Psychology - <AUTHOR> https://codereview-experiment.eu/ <comment><USER2> > To thank you more concretely for your participation in this experiment, we > are going to donate 5 USD to a non-profit organization on your behalf.

Well that makes it seem worthwhile.</comment>


Why Elephants Don't Explode - <AUTHOR> http://noticing.co/on-size-and-metabolism/ <comment><USER2> well at least whales still explode</comment>


The Chernobyl Conundrum: Is Radiation as Bad as We Thought? - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/chernobyl-hints-radiation-may-be-less-dangerous-than-thought-a-1088744.html <comment><USER2> One thing that seems clear in the Chernobyl exclusion zone is that for wildlife, living with radiation is less bad than living around humans.</comment>


Cynthia Dwork and the Brilliant Idea of Differential Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/cynthia-dwork-and-a-brilliant-idea/

<comment><USER2> The primary implication is that your use of centralized services will eventually lead to information leakage of data you didn't intend to share with anyone else. Remember this? [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak)

As our digital footprints expand, so does the probability we'll leak data we didn't expect. One solution to this problem would be self-hosted SaaS services. Keep your data where it belongs: at home.

<comment><USER3> I think Dwork's account is that the continued use of services _without careful statistical analysis and addition of noise_ will lead to information leakage. She didn't seem to argue for or against decentralization, but rather that there is no such thing as a non-personally-identifiable fact or a non-privacy- sensitive fact (eventually _every_ fact might lead to some inference that a data subject didn't want to be drawn, in some hypothetical situation).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I read a paper on ArXiv.org several years ago, at least 5 or 6 I would guess, that used these ideas to come up with a process by which you can modify a dataset such that any statistics gathered could not possibly be used to de- anonymize any participant. I have since frequently wondered why no one was aware of or using these techniques. Is it just that there is a lack of a usable implementation?

<comment><USER3> There are some implementations, like PINQ:

[http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/projects/PINQ/](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/PINQ/)

One difficulty is that the modification isn't necessarily a one-time thing that then allows the dataset to be _published_. In many of Dwork's proposed applications, the dataset is maintained by a trusted party and gets modified on-the-fly by adding appropriate noise in response to particular database queries.

So for most of these, you can't just imagine "do this to the database, and then you can publish it on your web site"; it has to be interactive.

In that case, there just may not be that many situations (yet?) where people agree on who can and can't be trusted with the personal data, and want to cooperate to set up this kind of relationship.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> With a follow-up article: [https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/still-a- brilliant-...](https://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/still-a-brilliant- idea/)

</comment><comment><USER3> I went to Dwork's talk about differential privacy at the Berkeley School of Information last week. It was a very good presentation.

The motivation was that we don't know how to anonymize real data sets (particularly in the presence of potentially unanticipated auxiliary information, such as a related database that we didn't realize exist, or related statements by people about themselves or about populations) so that they can't be deanonymized. For example, taking people's names, addresses, etc., out of a database isn't good enough because the database still reflects their demographic or biographical history, and there may be only one person in a particular context who has that history, or you may just be able to match up the records in the database with records in a different non-anonymized database or one that contains other fields.

Therefore, Dwork defines a probabilistic notion of privacy loss which describes a bound on the probability that an adversary can learn about the people in the database (I think described in the basic case by the probability that an individual's presence or absence in the database is distinguishable to the adversary, although that's not a precise translation of the rule).

The actual implementations of this idea generally involve adding noise to the database, for example deliberately introducing noise in the sampling or survey process that created the original database, or by having a trusted party that controls the database that adds noise in response to particular queries by untrusted users. Then it's possible to make probabilistic arguments about how much noise of what kind is sufficient to satisfy the probability bound.

As a result, people can do analysis of the datasets to find population statistics that are of interest to them, but with a low probability of being able to learn things about individuals in the database deliberately or accidentally.

An interesting example of a mechanism that Dwork gave that was proven to satisfy one kind of differential privacy bound (although it was invented much earlier) was a technique used by researchers who were studying sexual behavior. They gave people a spinner and asked them to use it (privately) and answer the question truthfully if the spinner came up one way, and just to say "yes" if it came up the other way.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randomized_response)

That gave people a certain level of deniability (you could actually choose the level by the design of the spinner) and so their incentive to worry about being personally associated with their answers was lower. As a result, researchers concluded that survey participants would be more willing to give honest answers to embarrassing questions (when the spinner told them to). But the resulting answers did have a clearly-understandable relationship to the truth so you could calculate some population statistics accurately (mostly about the true prevalence of "yes" answers in the population). Dwork explained that this can meet the differential privacy bound, although most of her own research has been on adding noise at query time rather than at collection time.

In that case, you get a "privacy budget" which gets "spent" as researchers query the database and examine it in various ways.</comment>


The HTTP 500 Solution - <AUTHOR> http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2015-11-27-the-HTTP-500-solution.html <comment><USER2> This seems like a good use case for a 400 Bad Request.</comment>


Show HN: Everblog, Blog directly from Evernote - <AUTHOR> http://everblog.me

<comment><USER2> Site works for me. Looks very cool too! How does this differ from pistachio, which launched here as well, IIRC?

<comment><USER3> never saw pistachio. link?

I just signed up to test. It looks awesome. Sorta itches the easymode+lazymode button for me wrt to blogging.

Wonder how many people (like me) love the idea of simple documents as the backbone of a blog?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd love to take a look at pistachio, I didn't see it either.

I'm glad you like the idea, that's exactly why I created it. You can use the Evernote webclipper to clip articles and the site uses embedly to add rich content automatically. I'll have a screencast on how to use it to create a link blog in the coming days.

<comment><USER3> ah: <http://postach.io/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Error 503 Service Unavailable

Service Unavailable

Guru Meditation:

XID: 466590669

Varnish cache server

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry for the error. I shouldn't have submitted it to hacker news right before leaving for a meeting. Lesson learned, it's fixed now.

The reason, in case anyone is interested: the footer shows the most recent posts. Someone created some posts that contained data that I wasn't expecting. That caused the footer to raise an error. I removed the recent posts from the footer (from my phone, before the meeting) and the site returned to normal.

I'm really sorry for the error, but I learned something from it, so thank you!

PS, existing blogs weren't affected, it was only the homepage.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why wasn't this turned into a third party Octopress plugin?

<comment><USER6> hasn't. yet. _hopefully_</comment></comment>


15 years of VLC and VideoLAN - <AUTHOR> https://www.jbkempf.com/blog/post/2016/15-years-of-VLC <comment><USER2> A little know fact about the VideoLAN project is that it was started so that the student organization could justify the need to replace the old networking infrastructure of the campus with a brand new high-bandwidth fiber optics network. They really wanted to deploy a fiber optic network but the school would have never approved it so they thought "OK, we need something that uses a ton of bandwidth, let's make a video streaming app".

They proceeded to start the VideoLAN project, with the VideoLAN Client (VLC) and VideoLAN server, and streamed movies and public television channels to the whole campus.

Interesting how it came to benefit everybody.

Source: I studied there and had a chat with one of the original creators of the project once.

<comment><USER3> On a related note, VLC's traffic cone icon comes from a club member drunkenly stealing one, which then ballooned into the organization collecting them and eventually inspired the icon.

[https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=9792](https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=9792)

<comment><USER4> Interesting. It's a terrible, stupid, confusing symbol for this project.

[edit] if the point is to be cryptic and appealing to nerds, it succeeds in spades [/edit]

<comment><USER5> and the part-eaten fruit of the apple tree is any more wonderful, smart, and enlightening a symbol for a computer / phone company?

<comment><USER6> Not at first sight. On second thought, it hits you: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_the_knowledge_of_good_and_evil)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I briefly operated an audiovisual services company (that lost a tremendous amount of money, but that had nothing to do with VLC), and after trying loads of players, came back to VLC. It allowed all of the stuff I needed and that many other players (including expensive commercial ones) failed at.

It plays literally _everything_. We regularly had sponsors show up the day of the show and hand me a USB drive with their ad reel on it. With no clue what the format would be, I would always be able to say, "yeah, we can put it in the playlist for tonight".

It has excellent playlist abilities, and excellent means of controlling the playlist. Our shows often included multiple sources (live video, sponsor reel, feature, short, trailers, etc.), and being able to manually select the right things at the right times with keyboard shortcuts was great.

It actually allows one to kill _all_ on screen displays, and can be reliably configured to always open video on the secondary display (projector) and controls on the primary display (laptop). This is shockingly difficult with every other player I used. They would _always_ have problems getting things onto the right display, or would show some kinda bullshit on the screen. This is particularly true of the DVD and Blu Ray capable players; they're an utter shit show, even if you pay a bunch of money for them.

So, thanks! I love VLC bunches. I've donated in the past, and will certainly donate again.

<comment><USER8> > It plays literally everything

In the ten or so years I've used it, I've only come across one file that VLC wouldn't play (excluded DRMed files) - a (possibly malformed) 24hr long MP4 I recorded a few years ago. Pretty much everything chokes on it (VLC crashes straight away), though oddly enough Windows Media Player handles it fine until you try to seek to a different time.

I've dabbled with other media players/codecs in the past, but usually end up back at VLC not long after due to its versatility. Impressive stuff.

<comment><USER9> I recently used this amazing little utility: [http://slydiman.me/eng/mmedia/recover_mp4.htm](http://slydiman.me/eng/mmedia/recover_mp4.htm)

It helped me recover some GoPro footage that went corrupt. You feed it a known good video from the same camera/same settings and then it basically uses the structure of the good footage to rebuild the bad footage. It worked a treat after I found a good file for it.

Have a look at it, you may find it helps you out.

<comment><USER8> I don't currently have access to the drives it is stored on, but I'll give it a go next time I do. Thanks for the suggestion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> In the earlier days of mainstream desktop linux (~2005), video codecs were a complete shitshow. VLC was a godsend during those times - it just worked. Still the first thing I apt-get after a fresh install.

If you're reading this team VLC, thank you for your work. Ways to contribute to VLC: [http://www.videolan.org/contribute.html](http://www.videolan.org/contribute.html)

<comment><USER11> Quicktime on Mac OS remains a shitshow to this day. I still have not figured out how to use third party srt files for subtitles.

<comment><USER12> You can use VLC on OSX as well. It works great!

<comment><USER13> When watching h.264 VLC consumes lots of CPU when QuickTime doesn't. I don't know why.

<comment><USER14> I assume that it is because QuickTime is using your GPU to decode the h.264 but VLC isn't.

There is support for hardware accelerated h.264 decoding in VLC; you just need to enable it. I think the option is in Input and Codecs tab in the preferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> A client once gave me a lecture about how FOSS couldn't possibly produce software with the quality of commercial and was really just a parasitic element on software development.

He pulled up a video talk by some "expert" on the topic.

Oh yes, he used VLC.

Thanks for the classic "umm.. you know..." moment VLC project.

<comment><USER16> > FOSS [...] was really just a parasitic element on software development.

That's a weird claim. It's not like FOSS is taking tax money or forcing people to pay for something they don't use. How else could it possibly be parasitic?

<comment><USER15> It was a long convoluted argument. It went something like, "if all of those communists hadn't just made all that stuff for free then lots more people would have jobs building it". Also it all violated patents and was inherently inferior (but by its dastardly and audacious existence, prevented the better commercial stuff from being made). As well as costing the jobs. ???

It was about as coherent as cooked spaghetti.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The most difficult challenge was to survive constant pressures from crapware for bundling deals.

Filezilla and alikes succumbed to that long time ago while VLC stand above the crowd.

Kudos, hats off and happy birthday!

<comment><USER18> > The most difficult challenge was to survive constant pressures from crapware > for bundling deals.

We receive 5 of those offers per week, with VLC. And the amounts proposed are very very tempting.

<comment> slipstream- Would be nice to see the text of those offers, like the way the rpi foundation released the text of the offer they got (I've started to investigate the PUP ecosystem, and now said ecosystem includes the shittiest Indian winlockers and fakealert trojans, designed to get less knowledgeable user to call fake tech support)

<comment><USER18> mail me and I can send some of those.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Since several people have said "it opens everything!" I thought I'd list a couple it doesn't handle: HYMT codec (multithreaded version of Huffyuv, useful for lossless capture of HD) UT Video codec various versions (also a multithreaded lossless codec set, I believe some versions VLC can play... but not the last several), oh and some FFV1 variants (clearly ffmpeg's fault, but still). All the above work fine with MPC-HC on Windows, if you have the codecs installed. VLC is still my player of choice, but as I've used HYMT and UT Video a lot, I've missed having them supported.

<comment><USER18> Send me those files.

We should have fixed both in the last version.

<comment><USER20> Slightly off-topic: Do you also look for files that play okay, but the audio and video are off-sync? Also, files where audio stops playing when seeking, for a few seconds? That seems to happen a lot to me.

<comment><USER18> Yes, we do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> VLC is amazing. As a friend put it, _" VLC will open everything, even a can of tuna"_. Thanks for VLC, VLC devs.

</comment><comment><USER22> I love VLC's engine, but have never been a fan of its UI, especially the configuration interface. How well separated are the UI and engine? Building a new UI for VLC seems like a fun project.

<comment><USER23> You might want to check out VLC for Windows Store. We're trying new UI and user experiences and will release soon an update on Windows 10 with an improved design (cleaner and faster).

<comment><USER24> I've had a pretty poor experience with VLC on the Windows Store.

I tried it on my tablet (an HP Stream 7) running Windows 8.1, hoping to use it to play the music from my iTunes library (by copying the _Music_ folder in iTunes' _iTunes Media_ folder from the computer that I use iTunes on to a microSD card inserted in the tablet's microSD card slot).

Unfortunately, it had a number of issues:

Issue #1:

It seems that VLC doesn't like the directory structure iTunes uses to store your music (when you've checkmarked the option in iTunes to 'Keep iTunes Media folder organized'), which consists of the top level (the 'Music' folder) containing folders named after each artist, which in turn contain folders named after the albums of each respective artist, which in turn contain the actual music files for those albums.

The reason I believe VLC doesn't like this way of having the music organized is because after letting VLC read this music folder, VLC showed the albums in a completely non-sensical way (it was showing duplicate entries for the same album, with tracks in those albums being split between the duplicates (despite the music files containing ID3 tags!)).

Issue #2:

There's no way to tell VLC _not_ to search for information on the tracks from the Internet. It shows some of my songs with erroneous album art, etc. My songs that come from actual albums already have the album art embedded, so I don't need VLC applying completely irrelevant album art to songs that aren't actually from an album!

Issue #3:

It's _extremely_ slow (on my HP Stream 7)!

――――――

I ended up switching over to MediaMonkey on the Windows Store, and while it has a host of issues of its own (it doesn't show notifications for songs with album art, the UI gets glitchy after using it for a while _(stuff like not showing text in the app anymore, so you can't see your track names… which can only be rectified by closing and reopening it)_ , etc.), at least it actually shows the contents on my _Music_ folder perfectly organized (no duplicates or other such issues), it doesn't try searching for metadata on the Internet, and it's actually _fast_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My favorite VLC story is about this guy from Syria providing patches while being bombed. I heard jpkempf tell his story this weekend at FOSDEM (video isn't up yet).

It was featured on HN couple of weeks ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10580208](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10580208)

</comment><comment><USER26> I just want to say that VLC is one of the finest pieces of software I've ever had the privilege of running and the contributors to the project should be proud of themselves. It is fast, reliable, and robust. I suspect many who use it don't realize how powerful it is. Its command line interface offers the ability to integrate the automation of complex multimedia processes. It runs everything I throw at it.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'll never be able to say enough good things about VLC, it changed the way I interacted with video permanently. I haven't thought about a codec in years.

only wish I found it sooner.

</comment><comment><USER28> Maybe there is a plugin or something that provides this, but I wish VLC had a little bit better library management. It gets very tedious trying to import a large library and fix meta-data.

I suppose if you go too far in this area, you just end up reimplementing Kodi/XMBC, though.

<comment><USER18> We are exactly working on that. If you see the Android and iOS versions of VLC, they have those library features.

It will come on desktop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> My first reaction was, "Fifteen, shmifteen! When's that Chromecast support you promised coming?"

In all seriousness, as they say, VLC just opens everything. Thanks for it!

<comment><USER18> > > [https://github.com/robUx4/vlc/tree/cc_master_intf_snd2](https://github.com/robUx4/vlc/tree/cc_master_intf_snd2)

Should be what you want.

<comment><USER29> Thanks but to be honest, I am clueless on how to install it or use it on my Ubuntu machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I'm not entirely sure, but it seems that [http://formation- debian.via.ecp.fr/](http://formation-debian.via.ecp.fr/), a famous debian tutorial (at least in early 2Ks) came from that school too. That's what made me get into debian without too much pain.

</comment><comment><USER31> I used to promote VLC at every corner, until they dropped the ball on 4K support big time. Even with a good mid-price graphics card, they're unable to utilize the GPU hardware effectively, and if you don't have a good amount of CPU power, the app chokes when it's asked to play 4K video. Ridiculous, since even the integrated Intel graphics on CPUs are now capable of playing 4K without any trouble.

<comment><USER32> Out of interest, which media player do you use now? Are they cross-platform like VLC?

<comment><USER33> mpc-hc is the best for Windows.

<comment><USER34> SMplayer says hi :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I was very pleased to learn I could delay or advance the audio track on videos where the audio and video were out of sync, but I never did figure out how to save a video with the tracks properly synced and gave up.

</comment><comment><USER36> The best French-born software IMHO :)

<comment><USER37> That's a pretty lofty claim. Remember, Fabrice Bellard is french which makes FFmpeg and QEMU[0] french-born software as well ;)

[0] and some other less prominent stuff: [http://bellard.org](http://bellard.org)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> fucking amazing software, as good as it gets. kudos.

</comment><comment><USER39> One of the greatest pieces of software I've ever used! I have yet to find a format of video it won't open.

</comment><comment><USER40> vlc 2.2.1, latest desktop release, has a possible code execution bug relating to 3gp (which doesn't have to be the file extension). Most distros have patched it, but the videolan releases don't appear to be patched since they're 2.2.1 and since the file modification for one mirror of win32 2.2.1 is last April (of course it would be pathologically stupid to release patched binaries without a new release, but it's possible, and they don't appear to have done either).

[https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2015-59...](https://web.nvd.nist.gov/view/vuln/detail?vulnId=CVE-2015-5949)

<comment><USER41> Not many people open random remote video streaming links in VLC...

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> does network 2000 have any relation to foobar2000?

<comment><USER43> Your question had me interested, so I looked around a bit and found this forum post from "Peter" [0]:

>"foobar2000" is indeed a piece of random gibberish I had to type into "project name" box when creating a new project in MSVC, on the day all this started. IIRC I spent about 5 minutes on thinking about it - I wanted to get things working ASAP rather than worry about the name.

That forum profile has a link to Peter Pawlowski's website [1] and has been active since 2001, so I'd like to believe it's really him.

[0] - [https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?PHPSESSID=j8ru3u6374lh2vvh4...](https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php?PHPSESSID=j8ru3u6374lh2vvh4gcmpjb965&topic=9784.msg98900#msg98900)

[1] - [http://perkele.cc/](http://perkele.cc/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Use it all the time. Thanks for the great project!

Wish SRTP can work well someday.

<comment><USER18> Technically, it already should. File a bug report with a sample!

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I use VLC every day. A great multi platform app, very useful contribution to the open source community. Keep up the fantastic work.

</comment><comment> why-el By far my favorite VLC feature is when it picks subtitles automatically when they are named the same as the original video file. :)

</comment><comment><USER46> never realized VLC has been around for so long!

<comment><USER47> Yeah amazing isnt it Its a great player

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Seems that vlc 3 would have chromecast support. I'm looking foward for that.

</comment><comment><USER49> Is it me only who experiences a rather slow startup time with VLC on Windows 10? Once it's loaded it rocks (as long as I want to watch videos). For music, it's not the best tool, but it does the job.

</comment><comment><USER50> Still wished I could have VLC as an engine inside QuickTime or whatever's native to the platform/OS.

Is that possible or do you have to source the web for several obscure codecs?

<comment><USER51> OS-specific things are OS-specific. ffmpeg (the primary backend decoder used by VLC and many other OS projects) is a great cross-platform library that can play most things, but you need some kind of platform-specific wrapper (e.g. ffdshow on windows) to hook it into the OS' native services and make it available inside other apps.</comment></comment>


What if Facebook loses my data? - <AUTHOR> http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2007/07/what-if-facebook-loses-my-data.html

<comment><USER2> There used to be an option to export to CSV. Looks like they got rid of it. The fact that they are actually removing functionality says something.

A couple years ago I exported all my Facebook contacts into a mind map using FreeMind. I then sorted all of my friends according to where I met them. So for example, a possible node location would be College -> Classes -> CS100 -> John. Then if a person had introduced me to more people, those new people would fall under that person. Not only was it useful as a visual rolodex, but it was also useful for visualizing which people and organizations were the most socially productive for me.

<comment><USER3> I used to use an app called facebook sync. It synced my facebook account with my mac address book and phone. I had all my friends phone numbers kept up to date with no hassle. The application got banned last week and now I'm annoyed at facebook. As much as I like facebook I want to take that data with me sometimes, not even to go join a rival network!

<comment><USER2> Does the old version of facebook sync still work? I haven't upgraded to the new version yet.

update: I just tried it and it seems to work.

<comment><USER3> Yes it works. I think they told him to no longer distribute the app rather than revoke the api key.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Of course, anyone could write a Python script (or even lash together some shell script involving wget) that would spider your friends' Profile pages and any of your own relevant information (all messages and wall-to-wall threads). Then you would have your own local copy of everything, and would no longer be at their mercy if they suddenly closed up shop.

Hell, you could set it up as a cron job that's done every night. It would look to Facebook almost like the kind of activity I've seen from several users, clicking through all their friends to look at pictures, wall posts, and other crap.

I'm not saying that the current setup is optimal; I'm just saying that backups are certainly not impossible.

<comment><USER5> Is that kind of thing safe, though? With all probability, their robots.txt and user agreement disallows it. So if they detect your spider, they might shut down your account?

Not a good solution...

<comment><USER6> From my work with web web bots, I've seen that it's really so easy to make a spider that they can't positively identify as such.

If you guys _really_ wanted this then I guess I could show you how...

<comment><USER7> well why not... Also I guess the one way to stay safe is to somehow make it operate slow so for example it wouldn't aggregate 2000 pages in 5 seconds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> _A few applications that built this functionality have been taken off-line by request for TOS violations_

So _that's_ what happened to File > Save As in Internet Explorer.

<comment><USER9> Locking up your users' data ensures that there is an increased cost associated with migrating to a new social network.

They're just protecting their share of the market.

<comment><USER10> This type of 'walled garden' strategy has been disastrous for so many companies. Hope they change their mind.

<comment><USER9> I guess I beg to differ. I can think of many examples where providing proprietary services for locked-in users has been a primary source of competitive advantage -- consider why Microsoft fights so fiercely to maintain a high market share for a product which generates no direct income (IE). It's a little counter intuitive at first, but they're ensuring control of the market. That's a powerful thing.

Referring to facebook as a "Walled garden" brings to mind AOL's demise, but just because they may appear to be similar tactics the companies aren't doomed to suffer the same fate. AOL failed for a number of reasons, the largest of which was a failure to adapt to the needs of the market. Facebook appears to be a more nimble company and I would be surprised if it had similar problems.

<comment><USER11> "AOL failed for a number of reasons, the largest of which was a failure to adapt to the needs of the market. Facebook appears to be a more nimble company and I would be surprised if it had similar problems."

You reckon AOL became the largest ISP by "failure to adapt"? No...the failure to adapt came much later. They ruled for a long time. Facebook is barely a wee lad in comparison. If it gets a run as top dog for as long as AOL then Zuckerberg should count his lucky stars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Having gone to college in the Facebook age, would I even know who my college friends were, and how to get in touch with them? (Honestly, probably not)"

Maybe it doesn't matter much then...

Still, it's stupid that one can't export data from Facebook. I still wish somebody could explain the Facebook craze to me. Any introductory articles available?

<comment><AUTHOR> basically, the idea behind that comment is that while I have 10-15 very close friends that I still keep in touch with on a week-by-week basis, there are 290 other friends who I'd love to see, but would probably not think about out of the blue on any given day.

it helps me keep track of more people that i want to keep track of, and i can easily see a snapshot of their life to catch up on what they've been doing.

while in college, it helped me connect with more people, get the easy questions out of the way (is she single or not?), and connect with people through mutual friends (hey, you know her too?) broken down simply, facebook helped me make more and maintain better relationships more efficiently.

there's nothing nerdy about that at all. at Penn State, some of the earliest adopters were the greek scene.

<comment><USER5> By now I am thinking the main feature of Facebook is to give you an aggregated feed of your friends blog postings? That makes sense, although people could just get blogs elsewhere.

I understand the benefits of managing friendships, but still it sounded odd if you say you wouldn't even remember some "friends" without Facebook.

<comment><AUTHOR> it's not that i wouldn't remember them, just that i can't keep up to date on them easily... i might spend 5 years of my life without thinking of a particular person. with facebook, i can browse through most people i met in college (or later, for that matter) and stay connected.

and it's very far from just getting a friends' blog feed. you can, in 1 stop, check out their recent pictures, view what they've been up to, who's been talking to them/who they're talking to, their life status (relationship, employment), and any and all other information they choose to make available. i can also very quickly glance at someone i don't know, and get a quick feel for what they do/like/what kind of person they are.

a very simple but powerful example: i see all of my friends' upcoming birthdays when i log-in. sending some birthday wishes + a note is a great way to reconnect with people you don't talk to often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> That would be a great feature for Facebook to implement. I wonder if it's possible to get around the TOS if the application were to check with each user before sending their contact information to the person who requested it.

<comment><AUTHOR> seeing as they already agreed for that information to be available when they added the user as a friend, why would you make them agree again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ever see the movie "Eraser?"

<comment><USER14> Yeah. I wish i could have my time back, but nice rail gun.</comment></comment>


FAA checking potentially "catastrophic" issue with 737 Max wiring - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-737-max-faa-checking-potentially-catastrophic-issue-with-737-max-wiring/ <comment><AUTHOR> >Boeing is reviewing whether two bundles of "critical wiring" are too close together and could cause a short circuit.

>If a short goes unnoticed by pilots who then do nothing to respond to the situation, it could put the plane in a catastrophic nose dive

Well, that's awfully suspicious...

Would be crazy if the crashes were somehow related to this potential issue, possibly in connection with MCAS.</comment>


Beats Drum Machine - <AUTHOR> http://beatsdrummachine.com/ <comment><USER2> I propose an enhancement (stolen from Roland MRC operating system of yore): instead of a x to mark a note, use numbers from 0 to 9, to allow for varying velocity (0 sending a note-off, useful for many drum effects)

<comment><USER3> 0 to F gives you 16 - it will be easier to use with midi, which has base 2 amount of divisions

<comment><USER2> I mentioned it because I genuinely enjoyed drum programming on the MC500 MkII; I still think its interface is the fastest and the best for this (not so much for other things :). 10 velocity levels are enough for drums generally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can't wait till people are composing full songs as a series of YAML files and samples, then publishing them on Github.

After all, there's not a huge amount of difference, conceptually, between remixing and forking!

<comment><USER5> This already exists: <http://www.midi.org/dtds/midi_xml.php>

<comment><USER4> Interesting. Not really sure how much mileage there is in an XML representation of MIDI, other than as an implementation detail for bigger packages. I'd venture a guess that 'end-user' adoption is low? In the sense of, for example, people exporting as midi-xml from their sequencer to email to each other?

To be clear, I was more enthused with the collaborative potential and the extremely low barrier to entry, rather than with the notion of a text-file- based representation of sequencing. This project seemed more immediate, hackable, 'tactile' in a way, and more shareable than other formats/tools that I know of; although of course _much_ less powerful.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, MIDI is pretty big and nasty, but most likely the key missing link is user adoption of a non-binary (plain text) format. See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Music_Format_(XMF)>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Super cool, this is the kind of neat stuff that happens when programmers have hobbies apart from programming. Love it.

</comment><comment><USER7> Add the possibility of sub-second timing errors, that way the music will feel more real, as performed by a human.

</comment><comment><USER8> Great idea, that's an interesting approach. Lay down a score, and play it - truly a 21st century player piano. There's plenty of programs that will do this with confusing graphical interfaces and binary formats, of course. The yaml interface is the best touch.

I'm a musician as well as a programmer, and my favorite mobile/touch apps are the instruments. Now there's one I can play from the command line, too! To the tune of 'scrathing your own itch', my goal is to make an iOS music app or two. I'll definitely be reading the sources for this.

<comment><USER9> This reminds me of the good old time when trackers like Scream Tracker 3 and Impulse Tracker were the hot thing! They too were programmed by writing sequential "code". This felt more natural and easier to use than most GUIs of that time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I started off building something like this a while ago (and never got round to finishing it). I like your implementation better.

One interesting feature I had which you don't is polyrythms [http://code.google.com/p/drumscript/source/browse/PolyTest.p...](http://code.google.com/p/drumscript/source/browse/PolyTest.py) which I found quite interesting. Would be cool to see them included in this.

</comment><comment><USER11> I know it's a no-content comment, but: Thank You. I didn't know I had been waiting for this. But oh, I had :)

</comment><comment><USER12> This is the author - thanks for the comments! Interested to see what beats people cook up.

<comment><USER13> This is incredibly refreshing and inspiring, congrats!

I don't see a lot of audio-related Ruby projects around. How did you implement the audio engine? A quick look in the source files seems to show it's all pure Ruby.

A nice extra feature would be to edit/save and update live, while the loop is running, but I don't know if pure Ruby can fit the bill. And this reminds me of a language I've heard a lot of good things about: Chuck [1], which allows you to modify the code live (apparently it's used in Smule's iOS apps). Has anyone here played with it?

<http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu>

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm totally illiterate when it comes to music, but I do like electronic music. If you do end up creating something you really like with Beats, please do share the source code. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER15> This looks amazing! Going to test it right now!

</comment><comment><USER16> On OS X:

beats song.txt song.wav && afplay song.wav

Provides really quick feedback. On Linux you could probably just use aplay. No idea for windows?

</comment><comment><USER17> Trying to imagine Keith Moon hunched over a keyboard, laying out drum tracks... nah, can't do it.

</comment><comment><USER18> Looks great.

Can't wait for the emacs mode.

<comment><USER19> Emacs, yea.

Also, perhaps one can modify the program, so that it ignores characters other than period and X.

Then you can run it on regular text files or, alternatively, source code, to get cross-domain puns (text domain, rhythm domain, code domain).

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Cool idea.

This is currently the online drum machine to beat, IMO: <http://www.soniccharge.com/patternarium>

<comment><USER13> This is not an online drum machine... But if we're going there, allow me to suggest these: <http://burn-studios.audiotool.com/app> <http://seaquence.org/4v>

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder why set linespacing for pre tag to almost a average char width

</comment><comment><USER22> That's it, I'm getting the band back together. It's a quartet: vim, emacs, pico & elvis.

Best. Program. Evar.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is cool but only a toy. I do look forward to a more elaborate version. Maybe an api where you can just feed tracks right in the browser.

Check out <http://audiotool.com> for a very advanced electronic music composer online.

<comment><USER24> > Notepad is cool but only a toy. Check out Eclipse for a very advanced IDE.

Apples to oranges?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Timedrip – Drop a message to the future - <AUTHOR> https://www.timedrip.com/

<comment><USER2> This is a really cool concept. I feel there is something to this idea of 'drops', but hard to describe. It is like a delivered time capsule.

I like the use case of people making a prediction 'drop', then have it show right after a specific time. That and possibly long messages to be opened on a significant date or time.

Definitely need to work on putting a value prop up and letting people know what they could possibly do with the app.

edit: just saw this on TC [http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/05/drop-the-location- based-mes...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/05/drop-the-location-based- messenger-closes-1-25m-from-atlas-ventures-spark-capital)

<comment><AUTHOR> Location-based messaging sounds interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great, but you should definitely describe the purpose of the service on the front page. I had to dig around in the footer to find the 'about' page for details....

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback. I agree with you, I'll put more description on the front page. ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You make a "Drop" with a message, a title, and a future timestamp. Before the reveal time, anyone can see the title. Once the time you specified is reached, the message will be revealed to everyone.

Do I understand it correctly?

<comment><USER5> I clicked on one of the ones which said "Time's up!" and it asked me for a password. So perhaps they are also password protected.

Like you would give the password to someone who you wanted to read it?

The most glaring flaw is that this service isn't necessarily going to exist in a month, year, decade or century.

<comment><AUTHOR> All password protected drop has a little 'lock' icon on the top. Well, I'll try my best to keep the service running as long as possible. But I agree with you, it requires a lot of works to keep any services running in a long run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Friendly NoScript user reporting in: I only see a blank white page!

<comment><AUTHOR> May I ask which device and browser are you using? Timedrip is built by AngularJs on the client side, so it relies on heavy Javascript.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Currently in public beta.

</comment><comment><USER7> What is this? I'm on a phone and it doesn't really say. Seems interesting though.

<comment><AUTHOR> Timedrip lets you send timed message to public or friends, you set your own 'showtime', and your message can only be revealed on that time, a countdown timer will be displayed before your showtime.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What is the role of communication in a programmer's career - <AUTHOR>

I'm a senior in a CS major at BYU. For an assignment in my advanced writing class, I need to interview a professional in my field (programming, preferably python backend or javascript/html/css frontend). It's short notice, and probably a little presumptuous to ask this online to a community at large, but I feel like this would be the place to try. If you'd like to help me, you can email me responses to swsieber [at] [that one google mail site].com
But feel free to post it as well. It'd be great to have a general discussion - it'd be interesting to see how the experience differs workplace to workplace. I think this is a vital part of programming that's often missed. I know I need work on it.
Here are the questions:
- What do you program?: the languages, the type of program and in what domain (medical, developer tools, etc)
- What kind of writing (and other communication) do you do?
- What kinds of audiences do you write for? Who's the hardest to communicate with? How is this influenced by your seniority and role?
- How much time do you spend writing during a typical workday?
- How important is writing (and other communication) to such things as salary, prestige, and promotion?
- What would you focus on in learning and preparing to write better for a programming job? <comment><USER2> > _What do you program?: the languages, the type of program and in what domain > (medical, developer tools, etc)_

Javascript, end-to-end. I build RESTful APIs for consumer-facing web applications (social and ecommerce mostly); and the occasional single-page-app client. I lead a small cross-functional scrum team.

> _What kind of writing (and other communication) do you do?_

Lots of emails, lots of shared google-docs, lots of diagramming and flowcharting, the occasional powerpoint or PDF presentation, and the occasional proposal or technical spec.

> _What kinds of audiences do you write for? Who 's the hardest to communicate > with? How is this influenced by your seniority and role?_

There are 3 distinct audiences: Higher-ups (product stakeholders and managers), team-members (people actually building the products with me), and the support team (offshore QA and pentesters, etc, who aren't really part of the core development team, but are still helping quite a lot). Communicating UP the foodchain is by far the hardest. Stakeholders often have only a vague understanding of what the team does all day; and might have an understanding of the product that is outdated or simply false. These communications have to be tailored to each specific listener. You have to understand what that particular investor/manager/product-owner thinks before you can attempt to inform that opinion. You also have to gauge their technical expertise before you can "talk tech" to them. Otherwise you'll sound like you're from Mars.

> _How much time do you spend writing during a typical workday?_

I'll go days or weeks without needing to write anything substantive; then a report or presentation will be due and I'll have to write all day.

> _How important is writing (and other communication) to such things as > salary, prestige, and promotion?_

Important for your _TEAM 's_ prestige, not for your own personal benefit. Writing (especially to stakeholders) should praise team effort, but IMHO, a good team-leader will fall on the sword for any shortcomings in the product. So, the writing you do should get your team-member's well positioned for a promotion or salary-increase; but not necessarily you.

> _What would you focus on in learning and preparing to write better for a > programming job?_

Two things:

1\. Learn how to communicate technical problems to non-technical people.

2\. Learn how to communicate business problems to technical people.

There's often a "ships-passing-in-the-night" problem there. So my role as a senior person is often one of "translator" or "ambassador" between the two camps.</comment>


The security footgun in etcd - <AUTHOR> https://elweb.co/the-security-footgun-in-etcd/ <comment><USER2> Great post, but what is the solution? System generated tokens authenticated somehow? I'm very much a noob here.</comment>


Ask HN: Can this app increase your productivity? - <AUTHOR> Greetings, Please help me with your valuable feedback(will take about 3 mins of your time). I am building a desktop app for developers to fight procrastination. The app lets you set a single goal with deadline and then shows curated bite sized motivational content(<3 mins). And then the app goes in the background, it notifies the user once when deadline is near. You can checkout more about the app on landing page getmomentum.tk
Do you think it will help you motivate yourself and achieve goals within deadline?
What will be the most important aspect of app for you to try it out? What features would you suggest to make this app work for you? Any other feedback/feature request you want to share?
Thanks a lot in advance <comment><AUTHOR> Please checkout the landing page here [http://getmomentum.tk/](http://getmomentum.tk/)</comment>